To all of this Susan Brundon answered no, in a voice that constantly grew lower, but which never faltered, hesitated.  The Mayor turned aside for a whispered consultation with the High Constable.  The former nodded.  “Have you any—­shall we say—­proprietary interest in Mr. Penny’s affairs?” Her reply was hardly audible in the room stilled for what might be revealed.  “No,” she breathed, her gloved fingers interlacing.  Jasper Penny’s lips were drawn in a hard line; Stephen gazed fixedly at the floor.  The Mayor gesticulated affably toward the lawyer.  “That’ll do,” he declared.  “Pleasure, Mr. Penny, to have you so completely cleared.  I shall have to demand your assistance further, though—­knowledge of Mrs. Scofield.  And, in the case of her apprehension and trial, you will, of course, be called.  Communication will be made through Mr. Jannan.  No doubt in our mind now of the facts.”  A policeman opened the door and a surge of the curious pressed in.  “Take her away,” Jasper Penny whispered to Jannan; “this is damnable.”

Susan rose, gathering up her mantle, and moved to Stephen Jannan’s side.  He offered his arm with a formal courtesy, and together they made their way out through the corridor.  Jasper, lost in a moody abstraction, waited until they had vanished; and then, with a lowered head, walked rapidly over Chestnut Street in the direction of the terminus of the railroad for Jaffa.  A brigade of cars was made up; he took a place and was immediately dragged on and over the viaduct to the plane and waiting engine beyond.  He could see, from the demeanour of the loungers on the Jaffa platform, that the news of the murder, his connection with it, had preceded him.  To-morrow’s papers would provide them with full accounts, the name of Susan Brundon among the maculate details....  The meanest cast boy in his works would regard him, the knowledge of Essie, with a leer.

His mother was at the main door of Myrtle Forge, pale but composed.  “Take Mr. Penny’s overcoat,” she brusquely directed a servant.  He had never seen a more delectable supper than the one awaiting him; and he tasted most of what found its way to his plate—­he owed that to the maternal solicitude secretly regarding him, hastily masked as he met his mother’s gaze.  Sitting later in accustomed formality the dulness of a species of relief folded him.  The minor sounds of his home, the deliberate loudness of an old clock, the minute warring of his mother’s bone needles, her sister’s fits of coughing, painfully restrained, soothed his harried being; subjected to an intolerable strain his overwrought nerves had suddenly relaxed; he sank back in a loose, almost somnolent, state.  A mental indolence possessed him; the keen incentives of life appeared far, unimportant, his late rebellions and desires inexplicable.  Even the iron was a heavy load; the necessity of constantly meeting new conditions with new processes, of uprooting month by month most with which the years had made him familiar, seemed beyond his power.